Abortion, Infanticide, and the Hardening of Hearts

Children, especially newborns, have an almost magical ability to melt hearts. Their sweet innocence and delicate features can tenderize even the grumpiest of old men. Of course, there are exceptions. At times, the very presence of babies, born and preborn, has hardened human hearts beyond comprehension, making monsters of men, or perhaps revealing the monsters they already were. Satan has always reveled in child-killing. For example, Pharaoh’s obsession for power caused him to order the Hebrew midwives to drown every newborn male in the Nile River, driving him even further into his own darkness. Centuries later, the news of a baby who would be born to an unwed mother nearly drove King Herod to madness, causing him to commission a killing squad to hunt down and slaughter every baby boy in Bethlehem under two years of age.

Unfortunately, cold-blooded child killers aren’t confined to ancient history. Scott Petersen, Susan Smith and Chris Watts have become modern day cuss words for having murdered their own offspring. Repulsed by their satanic barbarism, we label them “bad seeds” and search frantically for some way to divorce them from our species. One day we’ll dissect their postmortem brains with a dogged determination to find some genetic mutation that might forever separate us from them. We’re nothing like them, we assure ourselves.

But then there’s the Democrat Party, made up of millions of Americans, hellbent on defending and promoting abortion. For decades they did so by denying the humanity of the preborn by comforting themselves with the foolish notion that the fetus was only a “blob of tissue.” But human embryologists disagreed, and so did our eyes as advancements in ultrasound technology gave us a window into the womb. That which the American Medical Association declared as far back as 1859 was undeniably clear; the kind of beings abortion kills are human beings. Moreover, pro-lifers began lifting dismembered children from abortion clinic dumpsters to “expose the fruitless deeds of darkness,” (Eph. 5:11) to anyone who dared to look.

As a result, the “party of death” was eventually forced to concede the humanity of the preborn and borrowed from the playbook of other genocidal campaigns, resurrecting the handy “human non-person” category by denying them personhood status and offering a mile-long list of subjective “personhood tests” to determine who counts as one of us. But pro-lifers got educated and soundly refuted these “tests,” demonstrating that the only differences between the born and the preborn are the superficial differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency, none of which justify killing you at any stage of your development.

Undeterred in its mission to defend and promote abortion, the heart of the Democrat Party continued to calcify. In an NBC Meet the Press interview during the 2016 presidential campaign, abortion championess, Hillary Clinton, conceded even the personhood status of the preborn, but argued that these persons should still be deprived of their constitutional right to life. No more Mrs. Nice Guy.

For years Planned Parenthood, the right arm of the Democrat Party, downplayed the role of abortion in the services it provides, making the farcical and demonstrably false claim that only 3% of their resources were devoted to performing abortions. However, on January 8th, newly-minted president Leana Wen admitted, “First, our core mission is providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion.” So, there you have it, Planned Parenthood is all about abortion.

On January 22nd, Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law the so-called “Reproductive Health Act,” narrowly defining a “person” as “a human being who has been born and is alive,” and legalizing abortion up to birth and beyond. Yes, beyond! Now, even if the targeted infant miraculously escapes the powerful suction of the abortionist’s cannula or his steel-jawed forceps, she can be denied life-saving medical treatment and can be left to die. Like a pack of hungry hyenas, abortion supporters – now officially infanticide supporters – in the Senate chamber, jumped to their feet and cheered with bloodthirsty enthusiasm as Governor Cuomo signed this death warrant into law. Another “Give us Barabbas!” moment in human history. Perhaps the paper-thin “safe, legal & rare” pretense of civility will now be replaced with a more honest, “Shout Your Infanticide!” refrain.

And now millions of Americans who make up the Democrat Party, including many professing Christians, have grown comfortably numb to the cries of innocent children on both sides of the birth canal! To borrow the words of former slave-trader, John Newton, their hearts have slowly been robbed “of every gentle and humane disposition,” and “hardened like steel, against all impressions of sensibility.” Joni Eareckson Tada, in her book, “When Is It Right to Die?”, writes, “The unthinkable became tolerable. And then acceptable. And then legal. And now, God help us, applaudable.” So true, but it doesn’t stop at applaudable. Democrats have made it clear they will stop at nothing until the unthinkable becomes mandatory. For example, Illinois law currently requires pro-life doctors to violate their deeply held religious convictions by referring patients for abortions and counseling patients on what it calls the “benefits” of abortion. Another Illinois law,HB 2495, is in the works which would remove conscience protections from pro-life doctors, nurses, and hospitals who refuse to participate in abortions. A California law actually required pregnancy care centers to advertise for abortion in their centers until the Supreme Court blocked it on free speech grounds on June 26, 2018.

It is often said, “nothing is more certain than death and taxes,” and we can expect even more death from the Democrat Party. They’re not going away, and neither should we. Their relentless effort to threaten the lives of the preborn and the born must be dwarfed by our effort to love and protect them.